The Month of Sweat, Tears, and 50,000 Words

When most people think of November, they think of Thanksgiving, buying presents for Christmas, and, of course, Guy Fawkes night. But to many writers, November only means one thing...

NANOWRIMO!!!!

If you're reading this, you probably already know what NaNoWriMo is (you might even be DOING NaNoWriMo, in which case, good on ya!). But for those of you who have never heard of it, here's an explanation.

"NaNoWriMo" stands for "National Novel Writing Month", and it is a kamikaze-style writing challenge that occurs every year in the month of November. The aim is to write an entire novel -- that's 50,000 words -- in a month.

As I write this, thousands of authors all over the world are well into their novels by now, churning out vast word counts every single day in order to meet their goal. It is truly a writing challenge for the brave, and many have tried and failed. Many more have succeeded spectacularly (Joanna Penn's bestselling novel, Stone of Fire, started off as a NaNoWriMo project). The biggest challenge of all is to turn off your inner editor and just write. 50,000 words is a lot, and editing just wastes valuable time.

So you might be asking: What about you, Ellie? What are you doing for NaNoWriMo?

Well ... the answer to that is difficult. Thing is, I'm not actually doing NaNoWriMo ... but I actually kind of am.

Long story short, about the middle of October, I got the most fantastic idea for a novel. I couldn't wait to start writing it, so I immediately pulled out a notebook and started scribbling away at my first draft. Thing is, I just couldn't wait for NaNoWriMo -- my story wouldn't let me.

So close, and yet so far.

Still, I'm not giving in. I aim to finish my first draft of the book by the end of November, and then at least I'll feel like I kind of did something to honor NaNoWriMo (and I'm not even going to think about word counts at this point, because I've only written 20,000 words and I'm about two-thirds of the way through. Ouch).

So what book did I have a fantastic idea for? Well, that's a blog post for another time. All I will say right now is that it's a YA book (pretty exciting, since it's the first time I've written for readers over 12), it's kind of urban fantasy-ish, and the working title is The Dreamon.